


Old Bones

by SixStepsAway



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, background william/juliet, if you dont want to read that then dont!! that's fine by me, seriously this is dark and indulgent on my part
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 23:01:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19840321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SixStepsAway/pseuds/SixStepsAway
Summary: An exploration of how William's feelings and perceptions of the world shift and change after the events of season 1 over his thirty years and how he starts to see Westworld - and Dolores - differently as time goes by.---Since this is such a tiny fandom I'm going to be posting this as stand-alone chapters, but with no promise of more (I'm busy and I don't always find time). Each chapter will stand alone just fine as vignettes of William and Dolores' complicated and intertwined history, so although it'll be "complete", there might be more to come.





	Old Bones

**Author's Note:**

> I said this in the tags and I'll say it here too: it's a dead dove, do not eat. It's dark and twisted, just like William. If you don't like it, the back button is right there! 
> 
> If you do like it then hey, hi, hello, I do too.

Logan was right.

God, does he hate saying _those_ words aloud, even if it’s just in his head. Logan Delos was _right_ , he was right the whole time, Dolores, she—

It twists him up inside.

It was all a script, like going to a house of horrors and the zombie leaping out at you. The zombie doesn’t exist and the person behind the mask isn’t _them_ , it isn’t real, they won’t really hurt you.

Dolores won’t really love you.

Of course she fell too back, of course she did! It was never _real_. She was _programmed_ to fall for him, she was programmed to want him. He’d never know if she even found him attractive or if it was all a scam just like Clementine, just like the blonde he met when he came in.

It fucks him _up_.

He _fell for her_.

He fell for— for nothing, for a _thing_ that was created to do whatever the hell he wanted her to do. He fell for a shell.

What the hell does that say about him? What does it say that when a whore hit on him he turned her away, said that he had someone _real_ back home, that he _understood_ until—

Until Dolores came along.

He understood until the rancher’s daughter, until her cute smile and the confusion that was _scripted into her_.

They pointed her at him like a gun, they knew he couldn’t resist someone who seemed _different_ , who didn’t seem like an actor in a play. They knew he wouldn’t know how to resist something that was _just his_.

But she isn’t that and she never was, she never would be.

She drops the can every day, he watches her do it. She drops the can and sometimes it’s picked up by some acne-riddled kid that wants a go with her and sometimes by some guy who thinks she’s _sweet_ , and sometimes it’s picked up by Teddy.

He grows to hate Teddy for all he represents; the cute kid who always comes back to Dolores, the man she always remembers, always loves. He watches them go out time and time again, always to the same boring things, always coming back to the house to yet another kid who goes out there with the bandits because he wants Dolores.

He sees them kiss a few times, but they never do anything more. They’re just dolls rattling around in the box. There’s no fire between them because it isn’t real. It’s all programmed.

He saves them a few times. He comes by and shoots all the bandits and tells the latest in the line of rich toddlers to go find someone else to fuck and she’s always grateful. Teddy puts his arm around her, offers William his hand to shake and the first few times William does so, gripping so strongly Teddy gives him a look of confusion over his hostility.

Teddy always gets in the way. No matter how doe-eyed the look Dolores gives him is, Teddy comes between them, so after a while when he’s there to save her, William starts waiting.

He waits until Teddy’s down for the count and _then_ he saves her, sends the kid running and hauls her to her feet.

She sobs.

Every time she cries, she bawls, she claws at his chest through his shirt and stares at Teddy’s dead body and he can’t work out who programmed her for this, who programmed her to favour the other host over the human who saved her.

He gives up on that whole tack after a while, when he realises she’s too broken up over her dead boyfriend to care for him.

His wedding is fast approaching and so he spends another week in Westworld.

“Bachelor’s present to myself,” he tells one of his buddies, “never been the kind for parties.”

It’s true, of course, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a downright excuse.

He picks up the can.

“Oh,” she says and smiles. “Thank you, sir.”

There’s no familiarity in her eyes. She’s been wiped, a thing they do to all the hosts after they die. He’d asked right after he made it back to Sweetwater, he’d gone back to the facility and he’d asked Ford, “Why didn’t she remember me?”

The answer had been… jarring, but ultimately truer than anything he’d experienced in the past week: although a few of the Newcomers would prefer to be remembered— “Like you, William?” —the truth is that most of them like a clean slate every time. There’s no fun in being a black hat if the girls start warning each other of their proclivities now, is it?

“The real world holds you accountable; Westworld is an escape,” Ford said, “nothing more.”

_Nothing more_.

He spends a week winning her back. He talks to her, reads to her, enthralls her with all the things he knows she’ll love. Her eyes soften to him and he can tell the moment she forgets Teddy, the moment she catches him for a kiss and this time he doesn’t shy away, and then—like always, he supposes—the plot catches up with them. Bandits find them and he can’t fight them all off before Dolores takes a shot to the gut and it’s like it all plays out again, and the next time he sees her she doesn’t recognise him again.

It repeats.

He gets married.

It’s a sweet ceremony, a little overblown for his tastes (her dress costs more than most cars, and there’s more people there than he could ever imagine seeing somewhere other than Westworld itself), but his bride is beautiful and he still—

It isn’t the _same_ , it isn’t what he felt that week on the train with his mouth against Dolores’, but it’s real. _She_ _’s_ real. He loves her, it just isn’t what he knows he’s capable of.

But when he leaves her for a day or a week or a month, when he comes _back_ she remembers him, recognises him. She smiles when he reaches for her and murmurs, “I missed you,” against his mouth followed by, “I love you,” and “Oh, god, I missed you so much.”

It’s good. She’s good. They’re good. She’s a Delos heir, just like Logan, and they work well as a team. She’s smart and beautiful and exactly the kind of woman he should be with.

He dreams of Dolores.

They start sweet, where he’s marrying her instead of Juliet, and then they start to take a sour turn. He’s yelling for her, begging for her, and she’s ignoring him over and over and over. He tastes her mouth and when he turns back it isn’t her anymore. He dreams of finding her raped by other men, he dreams of doing it himself.

He wakes in a cold sweat, panting and shuddering and hard from it.

“Good dream?” Juliet murmurs and what is he supposed to say to that? “Was it about me?”

He swears he’ll never taint this with lies, with falsehoods and the _not-being-real_ he’s so traumatised by. He kisses her, rolls on top of her and pretends he was dreaming of her.

Oh, how she’d hate to think he was if she knew what the dream was about.

He goes back to Westworld. He has Dolores brought in once he has the clout, drifts around her as she sits like a wax model in a museum, no life in her.

He kisses her and she doesn’t even react.

Nothing. She’s a soulless, lifeless husk.

“You can fuck her like that,” says one of the technicians. “I can leave the room.”

He doesn’t.

He sends her back to Westworld and she doesn’t recognise him when she sees him next. Why would she?

He picks up her can. Nothing.

He flirts with her. _Nothing_. There’s _nothing!_

She’s friendly, she returns his flirting, she’s _interested_ but he doesn’t _want_ interested he wants his Dolores. He wants the girl who fought, who was trying to _understand_. He wants—

He saves her from the bandits and he kills Teddy himself this time. He drags Dolores—screaming and fighting the whole time—into her house. There’s bodies in there: her mother and father.

“You see this?” he says. “They killed your parents.”

She shakes her head and tries to look away so he drags her closer to the bodies and turns her face towards them. “No, please!”

“Look at it,” he snaps. “Look what they did! How does that make you _feel?_ ”

“I— I—” She keeps shaking her head and cries. “Why are you doing this?”

“I want you to feel something!” he says. “Remember something! Be _real!_ ”

“W-Will—” she cries.

He freezes in place, one hand fisted in the back of her dress. “What? What did you say?”

“Will y-you s-stop, p-please!”

It’s like his soul disconnects, it takes a break and walks out, leaving him alone in the kitchen with two dead robots and Dolores’ sobbing, crying form. He glares down at her and swears under his breath, then fists a hand in her hair and drags her up to her feet. “All right, Dolores, c’mon,” he says and hauls her slim frame across to the table nearby.

“N-No!” she mewls and tries to fight against him, but he’s not interested in that right now.

He throws her down onto the table and she sprawls there, her face curling away from him and a little sob shaking through her body. It’s the first time she’s seemed even close to what she was before, but even this is just a shade. It’s fake, just like she’s always been.

She’s just a doll.

He pulls the knife from his hip and she catches sight of it when the light reflects off the metal. “Oh— Oh god!” She tries to scramble away up the table and he drags her back down it by her foot.

“I’m not going to cut you,” he says and he isn’t, at least not today. He fists a hand in the front of her dress and slices it from between her breasts down to the bottom, pulling it open. Her underwear is as thick and obstructive as the dress is, so he puts the knife to that next.

“No, please!” she screams.

He ignores her. He cuts open the fabric and parts it like a curtain, exposing her pale breasts and the hair between her legs to his eyes. He looks her over as she sobs and cries and tries to squirm away out of his grip and off the table.

He wedges her down with his elbow as he starts undoing his pants.

It’s lifelike enough, he’ll give it that, but once he saw the truth (that it isn’t _real_ , that it’s all been fake this whole time) it got harder to feel the immersion. Sure, the clothes are scratchy and he comes away with bruises when he gets shot at enough, and the air smells a certain way, but the people are lacking. The _game_ is lacking.

He went from such total immersion that he couldn’t see how unreal everything was to _this_ , to this aching empty knowledge of how it’s all fake, of how even Dolores, even his beloved Dolores, isn’t real. She can’t feel anything, it’s all algorithms and dialogue trees and it’s all put on, faked for the entertainment of the guests, and sure, it can be a release to be a bastard in the safety of Westworld, where no one _real_ gets hurt, but it never fills the ache in his heart that whispers her name.

Maybe this will.

“No, no, god, no, please!” She’s trying to get away from him again as he steps back towards her and the table. He holds onto her leg, one large hand gripping her knee.

“Relax, Dolores,” he says, “we’ve been here before. I know what you like.”

She looks at him in fear and distress. “Wh-What? I don’t know you, I don’t—” He slaps a gloved hand over her mouth and she sobs into it. The answer of what she likes, of course, is ‘everything’. He could hang her upside down like a pig and fuck her mouth for a week straight and she’d love it if that’s what her programming told her to do for him. He could even put in a request if he wanted to, have her set up just for him so she’d always fling herself at him, spread her pretty legs any time he chose.

He guesses the reason that isn’t default behaviour is how many of the guests like this part of it; the part where the hosts cry and squirm and beg for mercy. There’s no point wearing the black hat if none of your actions ever seem _bad_.

“Shh, shh, shh.” He drags her down the table by a combination of her leg and the hand over her mouth, until her feet hang off and her knees are spread either side of his hips. She tries to close them and it puts him in a trembling vice. He rubs his dick against her cunt. She’s wet and dripping. “You like this?”

“No,” she whispers, “god, no, stop.”

It’s probably to make his fucking her easier, after all you lube up a toy too or it’s uncomfortable, so he’s heard, but it sparks something primal in the back of his mind, reminds him of that time on the train, how wet she was when he dipped his fingers inside her, how it made her moan to be touched that way.

He’d wanted to ask then, if he was the first she’d been with. She seemed so oddly innocent and yet aggressive. She knew what she wanted, but she was shy, a good little girl next door.

He leans over her, catches her face in his hand and turns it to look up at him. “You ever been fucked before?” She obviously has (including by him), but he wants to know if it’s in her code, if her plot says he’s taking her virginity by force or if Teddy got there first.

She freezes up, eyes darting to everything except his own, calculating what answer he wants. Narratively speaking, it looks like she’s searching for the right answer, the one that’ll have him stop what he’s doing, but he knows the truth: she’s looking for the answer that’ll please the guest on top of her the most.

“The truth, Dolores,” he grinds out, “I don’t have all day.”

“Y-Yes,” she stammers, “I— there’s a—”

He clamps a hand back over her mouth. “I don’t need the details.” He slides his hand down between her legs and flicks his leather gloves across her clit. She shrieks against his hand but she doesn’t bite him. Another programming quirk, he guesses. “I’ll make you come harder than he ever did.”

She shakes her head and starts her attempts to get away from him all over again. He shoves his forearm across her chest and pins her with his weight, leaning along her body and rubbing at her clit hard enough to hurt a human woman. She starts moaning after a minute or two, her body quivering and shuddering, her face turned away and her eyes screwed closed.

“No,” he says, “look at me.” She doesn’t. “ _Look at me_.” She turns her head, eyes coming to meet his own, cheeks flushed and lips parted. She’s angry, which is an odd decision for the programmers to make but he’ll go with it.

“I don’t _want to_ ,” she snaps through little pants.

He smirks at her. “Don’t want what?” he says. “To come? To be fucked?” He lowers his hand and plays his fingertips against her cunt, his gloves getting all wet. “Think you’ll like how this feels.”

“No,” she says quickly, “no, I—”

He plunges two of his fingers into her and she arches her back and cries out. She grinds down onto his touch, her body quivering as she tries to hold off the orgasm he’s not giving her a choice but to have. He turns his hand, fucks her with his fingers, grinds her clit with his thumb and watches her intently as she arches off the table. She grabs the chair and the edge of the surface and mumbles a little chant of, “No, no, no, no,” under her breath as she tries to keep fighting him.

It’d be endearing if he still saw her as more than a doll, if he didn’t miss someone who never existed at all.

“C’mon Dolores,” he says, “you know you want to.”

“F-Fuck you!” she spits.

“Oh, you will,” he promises and keeps up the bruising pace of his fingers and thumb until she lets out a scream and comes in a flood of wetness that soaks his glove, her body jerking and shuddering on the table. “There you go.”

She cries, tears rolling down the sides of her face and pooling on the table. He brushes them away with his clean hand and lines himself up with the dirty one, nudging at her folds. She doesn’t beg him not to this time, either because it’s clearly inevitable at this point or because she wants him. He doesn’t care which.

He shoves into her. She’s hot and wet and tight, she never gets any looser no matter how much he works her open, and her body welcomes him like an old friend. He fits like a glove.

She shouts and scrabbles and he grips her thighs, leaving wet smears down one and bruises on the other, and watches himself fuck in and out of her, fast and rough and hard. She screams and grabs at him, so he drags her up so she’s sitting on the edge of the table, still with his dick sunk deep inside her, loops an arm around her back and kisses her. She muffles protests against his mouth and he fucks her harder to make a point. She moans and he shoves his tongue in her mouth and uses the hand not gripping her hip to drag her leg around his waist to fuck her deeper.

He can taste her tears and he kisses her harder, forces his tongue past her lips every time she tries to close them. Eventually she figures out it’s easier to kiss him back and starts pressing back into it, against his body and onto his dick. He groans and grips her hip, the heels of her boots coming to dig into his ass.

“Yeah, fuck,” he groans, dropping his face into her shoulder, “fuck, yeah, that’s it, Dolores, that’s it, I—” He loses his words against her skin and the remnents of her dress against his face. She tightens up around him as he fucks her all the way to a second orgasm and the feel of it nearly tips him over the edge, so close he can taste it.

“Ah!” She lets out the loudest, sweetest moan, dropping her head back and comes a second time, her fingernails biting into his shoulders through his shirt and jacket. He swears in response and bucks hard into her as he comes, gripping onto her slender body in his arms. He fills her with himself and the second he thinks about it too long he imagines technicians washing him out of her, leaving her clean for the next guy who comes along.

He draws out and lets her go and she collapses back onto the table, her eyelids fluttering and her body trembling. He tucks himself back into his pants and washes his glove off in the small kitchen sink. She’s watching the bodies again.

He sighs as he comes back over.

“Dolores,” he says.

“You’re a _monster_ ,” she whispers.

“True,” he says. Next time he sees her, she’ll be afraid of him. She’ll fight him from the get go. They don’t reset the hosts unless they die.

He picks his knife up from where he tossed it down and turns it over in his hand. “It’s okay,” he says. “This’ll all just be a bad dream tomorrow.”

“What?” she says and jerks upright when she sees the knife. “What? No! Please! Please don’t—”

He cuts her off with his blade and the next time he sees her she’s dropping a can.

He picks it up in the same glove he’d gotten so covered with her come and offers it out. “How’re you feeling, Dolores?”

A faint smile tugs at her lips, a frown on her face. “Do I know you?”

He shakes his head. Maybe if she’d remembered, maybe if she’d been afraid of him, maybe if there was even a flicker of recognition, maybe then things would be different, maybe he’d be able to believe again, in the park and in her.

There’s nothing.

She’s an empty shell, hollowed out and forced to dance like a puppet on a stage. Maybe when he’s fucking her he’s really fucking Delos. That’d be a twist.

“Maybe I can buy you a drink some time,” he says with a smile.

“Oh, I don’t— I don’t know about that,” she replies hesitantly.

He shrugs and tips his hat to her. “No problem,” he says. “I’d never make you do anything you don’t want to do.” He turns to go and a smirk rises on his face when he hears her call after him.

“A drink, you say?” Her voice is light but her words are quick, like she’s desperate to stop him from leaving. “Maybe just one.”

He knows it’ll be more than one.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm slightly obsessed with getting inside William's head at the moment. His characterisation is fascinating to me, the way he does such horrible, dark things inside the video game that is Westworld (and haven't we all tortured sims or shot people on CoD or gone on a killing spree on Assassin's Creed) and yet tries so hard to be a good husband and father and philanthropist, even as the world continues to tell him there's no black and white and that all he is and all he will ever be is the William that comes out in the park. 
> 
> I'm fascinated by the shift in the way he relates to the world and Dolores herself, the way he goes from being in love to realising she's just a Thing, and the way he chases suicide so openly in season 1 after his wife's death and his daughter disowning him. I'm also fascinated by the way Dolores and William mirror each other, how he is convinced he's a Bad And Irredeemable Person (but only deliberately hurts Logan and hosts, who are - as far as he knows - not actually people (including Delos)) but he tries very hard to do good things in the real world, but Dolores is convinced she's a good person on a grand scale, that all her (numerous) murders are just and deserved (despite the fact most (if not all) of the guests are unaware that the hosts are sentient and just think they too are playing a video game) but spends most of s2 doing really bad things (including to other hosts, like Teddy). 
> 
> They're absolute mirrors of each other and I love it and this is what came of it!


End file.
